I also happen to live with someone at the moment who also loves chocolate, probably more than I do.

I love making Chia pudding. Ever since I discovered this amazing seed, I just fell in love! So I love making different types of Chia puddings and thought I would share the one I made for breakfast today with you. Normally I put this in the fridge overnight so I have a ready made breakfast in the fridge for the next day, but I don’t have a fridge and this still turned out fantastic!

I hate whenever people tell me it’s hard to go vegan because it costs a lot. Or when they say that it’s expensive to eat healthy. Let’s get things straight, you can make it as expensive or as cheap as you want. You can buy all your food from Healthy Options and buy all imported goods, or you can just go to your nearby palengke or market and just buys some local produce. Don’t get me wrong, I love going to Health shops because they have chia seeds, flax seeds, and other great wonders not grown locally, but that should only be a small percentage of your daily diet.

Here’s a quick tip if you want to add more nutrition into your diet for cheap, free even. I recently bought some fresh alugbati and put it in a raw pizza because I like to get as much of my produce locally, and alugbati just so happens to be really cheap at 30 pesos per kilo, and a kilo is a lot of alugbati! After I took the leaves out from the stems, I planted the stems into the ground at my friend’s place where I’m staying now. It’s been around 2 weeks since and I have an abundant supply of alugbati now for free! I just water it with the water from my laundry because I use an all-natural soap for my clothes, and they have been getting really big and abundant! Try and plant something, you’ll never know what you are capable of and how much it could save you as well!

Today I made a breakfast smoothie, and I wanted to spend as little as possible for it, so I used the bananas I had left, harvested some alugbati, bought some ice, and used some of the cacao nibs I was given when I was in Kaputian in Samal Island.

Here’s the breakdown of ingredients with the prices:

Bananas: 20 pesos per kilo

Ice: 12 pesos per bag

Alugbati: FREE

Cacao Nibs: FREE (it was a gift)

Eating healthy doesn’t mean just eating salads all day, it just means eating more nutritious things or at least adding more of it to your meals. Eating healthy also does not mean eating 1,000 pesos per kilo kale when you can only afford 10 peso pechay. If anything, I would go for the pechay anyway because it’s cheaper. It’s all about finding what works best for you and your budget. Lately I’ve been finding that I am more of a budgetarian than a vegan (just kidding, I’m just a vegan on a budget). Do what you can, it’s your life and your money. Just be mindful, and you can have whatever you want!

As some of you know, I have been in Davao City for about a month and a half now. I organized a small gathering here with my awesome friends called the Madayaw Davao Fruit Fest in September and we also organized a Plant-Based Nutrition Talk and Food Demo which I did with the beautiful Kristine Crouch.

This time I am doing a Health talk and Food Prep Demo with The Vegan Dinosaur here in Davao City on October 23, 2016. We will talk about how to eat healthy and how to make it simple for those who have no time to spend hours in the kitchen. We will also do a recipe demo and have free tastes and some freebies as well!

Right now I am living in a house where we have no means of cooking. Well, sort of. There is a steamer and a rice cooker but those take way too long to make hot chocolate, and there are nights when I just want a hot cup of cocoa. Luckily I’ve got a Vitamix in the house so I don’t even need to use heat when I want a hot drink, I can just use friction.

I love making hot chocolate in the Vitamix because it takes me less time really. I made sure to count this time it only took me 2 minutes until it was hot and steamy. If you want this to be frothy and and creamy, I suggest adding maybe 2 Tbs of soaked cashews make it thicker. This is just a version that has less fat it in compared to normal hot cocoa because I used powdered peanut butter which has less fat than regular peanut butter and doesn’t have the oily-ness of peanut butter. I use cashews when I don’t have powdered peanut butter though, or just soy milk and lessen the water.

If you don’t have a Vitamix… You can just switch the cacao nibs for cocoa powder probably and heat everything on a stove top or just mix it all with hot water. It should work. Also take note that this serving is for a MerMonkey which means it serves probably 4 people because I eat for a family of 4 hungry humans.

If you like cold drinks, you can blend this until smooth then serve it with ice, or blend it with have of the water until smooth then add some ice to the blender until you’ve got your desired consistency. There are many different ways to enjoy this, really.

Hot Cocoa with Peanut Butter and Cinnamon

Ingredients:

3 Tbs Cacao Nibs

7 Tbs Coconut Sugar

3 Tbs Powdered Peanut Butter

3- 3 1/2 Cups Water

1/2 tsp Cinnamon

Instructions:

Place all the ingredients into the Vitamin Blender and blend until smoooooooth, or follow the other instructions I wrote above.

Total time blending until hot:2-3 minutes

If you don’t have a Vitamix and want to get one for your kitchen, you can check them out here or here.

Want to get someone who hates vegetables to eat vegetables? My favourite way is through smoothies! What better way than by using the sweetness of the fruit to mask the taste of the vegetables? This is a smoothie I made the other day because I bought a tub of powdered peanut butter. I bought some bananas that morning and some vegetables, so I made this Peanut Butter Smoothie with Carrot!

Most kids don’t like carrots, but a lot of kids love peanut butter! So why not get them to eat their veggies while thinking they are having something sinful? Fee free to half the recipe since this recipe feeds one MiraMonkey and a MiraMonkey eats for a family of 4 humans.

Carrot Peanut Butter Smoothie

Ingredients:

12 medium ripe Bananas (12 pesos)

1 Large Carrot (8 pesos)

2 Tbs Powdered Peanut Butter (15 pesos)

Water or Ice (12 pesos per ice pack)

Instructions:

Place everything in a blender and blend until smooth.

Place in a Jar of cup of choice.

Feed to picky kids and watch them eat some veggies!

Drink some yourself, and Enjoy!

Total Cost: 47 pesos for a 2 Liter Smoothie

I computed the price to show you how cheap it can actually be to have a healthy vegan meal. This is a meal for me, pretty much. Not all meals are the same, but I hope to be able to show you more ways to have nutritious and affordable vegan meals that take almost no time to prepare!

I’m here in Davao and have been here for over a month already. Part of my daily routine is putting my bike panniers on the bike rack and heading to Bankerohan Public Market to stock up on fruits! I’ve really been loving making this particular smoothie just because I can be a bit lazy, but also because I like simple things.

Since I’m living with my amazing friend Sahara, we do not have a freezer so I can’t freeze fruit, but I did bring a blender and the convenience store nearby sells ice so that my smoothie dreams can become a reality. It’s been incredibly hot in Davao City lately as well, so making an ice cold smoothie is a small thing I can do to keep myself from melting.

I personally finish the entire recipe for breakfast because it’s just so good! It’s a pretty perfect breakfast smoothie too because it’s so rich in water, fiber, sugar and all the good stuff!

Pineapple Banana Smoothie

Ingredients:

1 Whole Pineapple

5 Bananas

1 Thumb of Ginger (Optional)

Ice (3-4 Cups or as much as you want!)

Instructions:

Place all ingredients into the blender and blend until smooth.

Serve and enjoy!

If you don’t have the appetite that I do, feel free to share this with your loved ones or just half the recipe!

Most people don’t like radish, I mean I didn’t like it before, so I understand.

Last year though when I first went to Davao, I stayed with some really awesome people and tried a radish salad for the first time. It was a bit different from this one, but that was the salad that allowed me to not hate radish. I also love how simple and easy it looked. So this year when I came back to Davao I decided to make a radish salad of my own. It’s different, but it’s incredibly simple and easy to make.

I think the secret is in how thinly one cut it, I mean it really could be. I’ve only liked it when it was cut really thinly and massaging it with a bit of sea salt also helps. It helps soften the radish which I think makes a huge difference.

Are you ready? Let’s get started!

Radish & Cucumber Salad

Serves 1 Salad Monster

Ingredients:

1 Large Radish

4 Cucumber

1/4 tsp Sea Salt

3 Tbs Pinakurat

2-3 Tbs Calamansi Juice

Instructions:

Peel the radish and cucumber, then keep peeling it until you have all thin strips.

Add the salt and massage the radish and cucumber until they are soft, there will be some water that will come out of the radish and cucumber, so strain that.

Add vinegar and calamansi and mix everything together.

Serve and Enjoy!

Pretty easy, right? I have to say that radish is definitely an acquired taste, so try it first. I seem to only like it served this way for now, but maybe in the future I’ll like it in a different way as well, let’s just wait and see!